原创 Have you heard of the great capacitor plague?

Thus, I was a tad surprised when my chum, Rick Curl, sent me an email pointing me toward this Tech Trivia video from the guys and gals at Arrow Electronics.

So, just what was the great capacitor plague of the early 21st century? Was it perhaps a scourge of robotic parasites that grew in computers and infected users via their mice and keyboards?

Well, perhaps not quite than bad, but it was pretty disastrous at the time. For reasons described in the video, humongous numbers of capacitors manufactured between 1999 and 2003 started to fail in systems around 2002 to 2005. The end result involved losses of hundreds of millions of dollars and a lot of very unhappy end-users.

I must admit that I was a tad disheartened after watching this video, but then something happened to brighten my day. Rick sent me another link, this one pointing to the Megaprocessor.com website saying: Well, it ain't mechanical, and it doesn't have vacuum tubes, but this project is still pretty amazing!"

The reason this cheered me up was that I was able to respond: "Ha! I finally got there first!"

Are you aware of any other interesting "component plagues" or weird and wonderful home-grown processors? If so, please take a moment to share them with the rest of us, because I love this sort of stuff.